


Airmail

by Dragonsigma



Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Airships, Gen, Marnis Culture in the Courier Fleet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 13:58:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7804516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonsigma/pseuds/Dragonsigma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Ranis, travel by airship was hardly extraordinary, but he had to admit there was something enthralling to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Airmail

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Serenade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serenade/gifts).



The message Ranis carried, given to him that morning by the Lord Chenar for transport to Rosiro, was quite clearly a love letter to a mistress there, if the perfumed paper and the extra coin pressed into his hand to seal his lips were any indication. 

It made little difference to Ranis what letters he was given, so long as he was paid. He was not one of those trusted with state secrets, though it appeared he had been deemed worthy at least of relaying proof of a wealthy man’s romantic affairs. That knowledge might serve him well someday, but it more likely would be of no use at all. Still, he filed it away in his memory. Couriers needed all the leverage they could get.

Another few assignments like this, and he would be able to afford a scarf from the old woman who sold her wares by the west fountain on market days. It would be worth it - the word on everybody’s lips was that the coming winter would be the coldest in years. He thought forlornly of warm clothes, of a moment by the fireside eating filling if tasteless stew with the boys who shared his tiny hostel.

But for now he could only huddle into his threadbare coat as he waited at the dock watching his ship come in, two other couriers on the platform beside him, one a young goblin boy who he had seen several times before but who had hardly ever said a word, and the other an elf some few years older than Ranis, who made no secret of his desire to serve in a noble house.

The airship  _ Victory of Nesaro _ was now close enough that Ranis could hear the roar of her engines even over the sounds of the city and the wind. Her nose neared the mooring mast; her crew made quick work of securing her, and just as quickly unloaded her cargo and the small group of missioners who had been her passengers. It did not take long either for the ship to be loaded with her intended cargo - glassware, or something else easily broken, judging by the markings on the crates. And then at last he and the other two couriers were allowed to board, and find seats in the cramped cabin, and minutes later they cast off.

The cabin shook roughly as they rose. Ranis saw the goblin boy glance around nervously, but none of the crew had so much as missed a step.

“‘Tis to be expected, in winds like these,” he said over the noise of the engines, offering a sympathetic smile. The boy didn’t reply, but looked at least a little reassured.

Despite the fact that the cabin was shielded from the wind, the chill only worsened as the craft lifted into the air. Couriers were only an afterthought to the designers of airships. They were made to carry cargo, and there was little benefit seen in wasting precious weight for the comfort of a few impoverished passengers. The crew cabins, meanwhile, would likely be better insulated, or the crew would wear thick coats to keep out the chill.

He might be cold, but Ranis knew this was a small cost compared to the task he would have had ahead of him had it been only a few decades before. In these modern times, what would once have been several days’ journey by horseback through land alternately barren and marshy could now be undertaken in a mere afternoon.

So much had changed in so little time. Now, goods from Nezholo were sold at market in Letharo, engineers’ shops populated once-empty street corners, and messages could be ferried from one side of the Empire to the other in a matter of days rather than weeks. And to keep up, the great industrial cities employed hundreds to build and outfit and crew their airships. 

The airships had quickly gone from the center of public imagination to just another daily sight, at least in the capital and the cities where they were built. There were even rumors that the Imperial family, notoriously traditionalist as they were, were interested in outfitting one as a pleasure craft, that the ship that right now was only a naked metal frame in the shipyards of Amalo would serve the Emperor and his kin in their state travels.

They would have a great deal of work ahead of them to make  _ that _ venture appealing, Ranis thought as he shivered. No, the spoiled nobles of Cetho knew nothing of the chilly, noisy, and unsteady reality of flight. But as Ranis watched the city shrink away beneath them and give way to fields, and towns, and then empty stretches of moorland, he had to admit there was something enthralling to it, even to one who had flown this route countless times before. Those cheaply-bound adventure novels with their salacious stories might not capture the truth of the experience, but they captured the spirit of it, the ideal image, the pride that elves might sail on the winds as easily as their southern neighbors sailed on the seas.

Several hours later, the vast shipyards and hangars of Rosiro came into view. The  _ Victory _ set down near the center of the city, and once they had moored, Ranis gathered his bag and set off for his destination, hoping to arrive before the quickly-approaching night.

The address on the envelope led him not to a grand estate or even a ramshackle cottage, but to a tavern tucked away down a dank alley. A sign outside the door featured in peeling paint the image of a grinning tangrisha chasing a noble lady, her skirt torn where the creature’s teeth had snagged it, and Ranis began to suspect that this establishment dealt in something more than exotic drinks.

Ranis checked the address again as a cat stared reproachfully at him from a windowsill for several unblinking moments before leaping away after some unseen rat. And then, grateful to escape the cold, he pushed open the door.

Despite - or maybe because of - the dark and the chill and the stench of the streets, the rickety building was as inviting as any palace. More so, even, populated as it was by commoners and not haughty men determined to sneer at a lowborn courier entering their domain, and as he entered Ranis was washed in warmth and friendly chatter and the sounds of cups and spoons.

The building was small, and at this hour of the evening, crowded with people returning from work stopping for drink, food, and gossip with their fellows. Ranis made his way to the counter, got the barkeeper's attention, and asked after the woman whose name graced Lord Chenar’s letter.

The barkeeper leaned back towards a inner door. “Sareno!” he hollered.

The woman who emerged several moments later was dressed in frilled skirts and a low neckline that left no doubt as to her profession. If Ranis had been at all enticed by what she offered, he would have stared. The well-respected Lord Chenar, consorting with a teahouse whore? Now  _ that _ could be a useful tidbit of knowledge.

“Interested?” the woman teased, adjusting her bodice to show a glimpse of breast. And then she caught sight of his courier’s bag. She laughed. “No, I suppose not. But I could find thee a well-trained boy, if thou hast the coin for it.”

Ranis chose to ignore that last remark. Though the woman was not wrong in her estimation of his tastes. The popular image of the courier fleet as libertine was truer than the gossips knew. It did not extend to them all, of course, but to Ranis it was worth the world to have a job where he was not thought strange or cursed, and where could find lovers, if not yet love.

“A message, from Lord Chenar,” he said, holding it out.

“Dira? What favor has he promised me now, I wonder…” Sareno snatched the envelope from him and tore it open with a roughness unexpected in one receiving a romantic note.

“Oh, he thinks himself so sweet. Delan and Henu will be glad to hear of  _ this  _ windfall,” she said, mostly to herself, Ranis supposed, as she did not elaborate for his benefit. Without another look at him, she retreated back behind the counter, and Ranis, his obligation complete, sought out a place to sit and rest before heading back out into the late autumn chill to find a place to sleep for the night.

A man in worn yet serviceable clothes leaned over a table, drawing in the attention of his fellows. “…went right up in flames, like Anmura’s sword,” he was saying, punctuating his words with violent and illustrative gestures. “It’s damned lucky nobody was inside. Sena would’ve been checking the forward bracing if he hadn’t been up drinking all the night before with those poet friends of his...”

A little further on, Ranis heard, in low conspiratorial tones, “…I hear he’s caught the ear of Varenechibel himself.”

“Hah!” his companion scoffed. “As if he’d pay it any mind. He’s too busy trying to marry off that daughter of his.”

“Poor girl,” commented a boy - no, a woman, wearing the grease-stained coverall of a shipyard worker, her goblin-dark hair cut short and curling around her unadorned ears.

“Brother!” came a jovial cry from a table in the corner, and it was a moment before Ranis realized it was directed at him. “Come and have a drink, and tell us of your travels!” The hospitality found in taverns and teahouses, he reflected, was something not often seen in the larger cities.

He sat, stowing his bag safely by his feet, and a steaming cup of something dark was put before him. He took a sip, and found it almost unbearably bitter. The others laughed good-naturedly at his expression. But he found the concoction strangely invigorating, as he continued to drink, and it must have been mixed with some sort of liquor, for before long he was laughing and exchanging stories with these people as if they were old friends.

And when the serving boy swept in to clear his cup away, Ranis did not miss the look the young man directed at him.

There were signs: a ribbon tucked just so, that jewel in this setting worn in such a way, little markers that indicated a man would be willing to share his bed - or, more likely, a shadowed corner - with another of similar inclinations. 

Ranis had learned the signs well, after the first time a young man had turned his head and his shy overtures had left him with with a blackened eye and bloody lip and curses ringing in his ears. 

_ This _ evening, so it seemed, would be far more enjoyable.

Henu, or so he gave his name, was a brother of Sareno; whether in truth or figuratively, Ranis did not learn. He did not much care, not with an alluring man so near. They spoke of little as Henu led Ranis into the back rooms of the tavern, where couches and pallets lay with little ambiguity as to their purpose. And they spoke little as they fucked, in a haze of mouths and hands and oil and groans. 

He learned only that Lord Chenar had promised Sareno a gift of great value, and that if he kept to his word, she planned to put the coin to quite a different use. It was only the next morning, while heading to the dock for a Cetho-bound airship, that Ranis found the pamphlets stuffed into an inside pocket of his bag. As he was curious, and there was little else to do on the voyage back, he read what they had to say.

The next time he landed in a shipyard city, he looked upon the workers with renewed sympathy, renewed anger at the injustice of their status, and he wondered if the world the pamphlet-writers spoke of so fervently would ever come to pass, and how it would finally come about. 

**Author's Note:**

> Join the tiny fandom discussion and RP at http://www.slashnet.org/webclient/thegoblinemperor


End file.
